On 30 May, ten days after the Venice Architecture Biennale opened its doors for the eighteenth time, Paolo Portoghesi, its first director, passed away at the age of 92. Perhaps because he grew up in the heart of baroque Rome, the architect always found inspiration in the works of Francesco Borromini and his contemporaries, from whom Portoghesi extracted design lessons that he succeeded in making compatible with his rationalist training. It was this constructive reading of the past – guiding thread of the mostra he organized in 1980 around the mythical Strada Novissima – that made him an influential theorist and the leading exponent of postmodernism in Italy.